Eating to Prevent Cancer
The human diet evolved over thousands of years to include the foods most beneficial to our health, but in recent times we have favoured a diet that excludes many of these essential foods. Returning to a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and other important foods is essential to preventing cancer.
The high proportion of cancer that can be attributed to the nature of Western diet is, as we have seen, a sing of the decline in the eating habits of a society that has lost contact with the very idea of diet and perceives the act of eating only as a necessary replenishing of energy without any concern for its impact on health. Although our intention is not to try to interpret the historic and socioeconomic factors responsible for these changes, we need to stress that these thought-free eating habits, focused purely on satisfying the need to refuel, are harmful to our health. At a time when we often tend to consider progress uncritically as a synonym for benefit, we must admit that this does not apply to our diets. On the contrary, industrialization is on the verge of destroying the very foundation of our culinary traditions. We tend to forget that everything we know today about the nutritive or toxic properties of a plant, or the use of specific food for therapeutic reason, is the result of a long quest by man during his entire evolutionary history to determine the value and quality of foods present in his immediate environment. What we today call “fruits” or “Vegetables” are in fact the result of a process of natural selection that took place over a period of some 15 million year, during which our human ancestors constantly had to adapt to changes in their environment and become aware of new sources of food that could give them an advantage for survival. In this way, diet as we now know it is a relatively recent phenomenon: if we transposed the 15 million year of the nutritional history of humans and their ancestors onto a 365-day calendar, agriculture, which is only 8,000 years old, wouldn’t have been invented until about 7 o’clock on the evening of 31 December, while the even more recent industrialization of food would only have taken place three minutes before the New Year
HOW WE SELECTED OUR FOODS
The evolutionary selection process of food can be divided into three major stages. During the first stage, which we will call “toxicity study”, human beings were forced to carry out multiple trial and error experiments to determine whether or not the foods available to them were edible. This was a perilous enterprise, no doubt, and one that was certainly marked by many cases of food poisoning, if not by sudden death, in the case of food containing toxins. Of course, in many cases, the observation of other animals’ eating habits proved useful and probably allowed people to avoid accidents: it is highly probable that the idea of eating oysters would never have occurred to human beings had they not seen sea otters doing it. However, it is certain that a large number of these trial and error experiments were necessary to identify those foods that did not induce illness or cause death, and which could thus be considered non-toxic. Such knowledge was probably transmitted to the immediate family as well as to other members of the larger community. Without the communication of the results of the experiments, these efforts would have been in vain.
During the second stage of the selection process, which could be labelled the “evaluation” stage, the non-toxic foods that had made it through the first stage became dietary staples, but were still: under observation”; despite their non-toxic properties, many edible plants do not really provide any benefit to the organism, either because they do contain toxics or drugs that may in the long term affect human health, or because they are of no positive nutritious value to us. For example, eating grass is not in itself dangerous to human health, but that does not mean that grass is a good dietary choice for human being!
The third stage, the “selection” stage, is where foods that were found to be really beneficial to health were chosen: those foods that have real nutritional value or whose consumption provides additional health benefits. Human beings, after all, do not eat solely to live; they wish that life to be as long and as agreeable as possible. This quest for longevity has led humankind to seek benefits from food that are greater than nutritional value alone; food was the only available resource that could have positive effects on health and prolong existence. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the history of medicine is bound up with that of food and diet; food, for a very long time, was humanity’s only medicine. The great ancient civilizations – the Egyptian, the Indian, the Chinese, and the Greek – all recorded in minute detail their observations on the positive effects of plants and foods on health, as well as their healing virtues. The importance of good diet as a factor in maintaining health was in fact the foundation of all medical treatment until the beginning of the 20th century. Acquiring this body of knowledge about what was good, bad, or neutral to health was about more than survival; it represented a cultural heritage of inestimable value, illustrating the fundamental relationship that exists among man, diet, and nature.
If we try to imitate the ancient civilizations and write a book today about foods that are good for us, there would not be that many foods currently in fashion in our society that would deserve inclusion. This break with the past explains how, at a time when medical science has never been more powerful, we are witnessing the emergence of a host of diseases, such as colon cancer, that were rare only a century ago. However, it is still possible for us to learn from the thousand – year – old wisdom that comes from close observation of nature. Using this knowledge in combination with modern medicine can only have extraordinarily positive repercussions on human health, and particularly on the prevention of cancer.
The importance that we accord here to the historic roots of human beings and their diet does not mean that we have suddenly become nostalgic about the past! If we insist on stressing this importance, it is because the most recent research has demonstrated that a certain number of foods selected by man over the course of his evolution possess countless molecules with anticancer potential, molecules that can really help reduce the incidence of disease such as cancer. The current lack of interest that our society shows towards the nature of diet is not just a break with culinary tradition but, more seriously, the banishment of an extraordinary source of powerful anticancer molecules.